A few weeks back I received this invite via email from colleague Duncan Rintoul, of the Institute for Innovation in Business and Social Research (IIBSOR) at University of Wollongong. Given the topic, I thought it was worthwhile sharing here also:

AES tech-eval: A new SIG focused on the intersection between evaluation and technology

These days it is no surprise to see mainstream and niche programs making use of tech-based platforms: web-based self-help tools, mobile applications, SMS-based reminder systems, viral videos, conversations on social media… the list is much longer than this, and ever growing.

We need to develop capacity among evaluators to work confidently in this environment, designing and executing sound evaluations that understand what these technologies are, how they can be used and how their impact can be measured.

There are also great opportunities for using technology in our evaluations — wikis, online forums, online surveys, social media monitoring… again the list is long and growing.

Spilling over from one of the parallel sessions at the 2011 AES conference, a crew of around 15 people has started pulling together a new AES Special Interest Group around this intersection between evaluation and technology: AES tech-eval.

It’s early days yet, but two things you can do for now:

• Join the email listserv
• Check out v1.0 of their resource library of conference papers, published evaluations and other resources for evaluating tech-based programs and program elements.

Go on, join them! If technology freaks you out, swap fear of the unknown with curiosity and see where it takes you. If you’re already working comfortably in this space, help lead your colleagues forward.

Tim Cotter writes in his latest “Awake” newsletter on “Do positive messages lead to more positive outcomes?”, which looks at the efficacy of positive and negative messaging in relation to behaviour change. I’ve read a lot of different articles that talk about the “loss aversion bias” and many others on how positive messaging can achieve better results, and wondered about the two.

The up-shot is “it depends” — primarily where the person is on their change journey.

Are we primarily trying to draw attention to the issue, or get already-concerned people into action? If we apply Obermiller’s observations to the bypass patients mentioned earlier, it is clear that the people in question were already painfully aware of the seriousness of the issues. So the positive approach to getting them into action was successful because it worked on motivating and supporting them to act.

Tim concludes by saying “These findings also highlight the importance of doing sound research before committing effort and resources to behaviour change initiatives.” Couldn’t agree more — that’s certainly our approach…

(Oh, and I recommend subscribing to Tim’s newsletter, which is available on his website.)

As I mentioned in my previous post, I had the pleasure of presenting at UX Australia last week. As is tradition, my presentation is now up on Slideshare:

The presentation centres around our experience on the FlavourCrusader project — specifically considerations of behaviour change models and the workshop process we undertook earlier in the year at Social Innovation Sydney.

The presentation makes mention of Les Robinson’s “5 doors” model — just a quick mention that Les runs workshops on this model and facilitation techniques, including some later this month.

My understanding is that the talks were recorded, so once the audio is ready I’ll do my best to sync it all up… But in the meantime you can get the gist from the the presentation + speaker notes (PDF 18.3 MB), which contains further pointers to some of the references I mentioned in my talk.

Thanks to everyone who participated in the research process — both behind the scenes and as participants — but special mention to Sharon Lee and Penny Hagen for their input into both the workshopping process and presentation, and to BJ Fogg for kindly granting me permission to use his model in the slide deck.

I’ve just completed 3rd semester of my masters degree, and I wanted to share one of the papers I wrote on the concept of Platforms for shared value creation, that builds on the model that I outlined in my Web Directions South 2010 talk.

The paper, which is provided under a Creative Commons license:

…proposes a model of service delivery that has the potential to create shared value (Porter & Kramer 2011), addressing pressing societal and environmental needs while delivering commercial returns. The aim of this paper is to introduce the model — the “platform for shared value creation” (PSVC) — as a first step towards further exploration in the future. The model is not yet fully-formed and as such this paper should be considered more as “thinking in draft” for further discussion and refinement.

While the nature of these things means it takes an academic tone, I hope that it provides some value as a contribution to discussions around shared value, Collaborative Consumption, and social innovation. I would love to know any feedback you might have, so please drop me a note in the comments if you find it useful, or want to challenge or probe any of its assertions.

Just a quick note to say that I’ll be attending the Communities and Technology conference happening in Brisbane next week. In addition to attending the Friday and Saturday presentations, I’ll be participating in the Food(ing): Between Human-Computer and Human-Food-Experience workshop on Wednesday.

I’m particularly looking forward to the workshop as an opportunity to learn from others working in this area, and to share my experience from both my masters studies work and the learnings from the FlavourCrusader initiative. In related news, my participation in the workshop stems from a proposed book chapter that my friend and colleague Penny Hagen and I proposed to the Urban Informatics folks at QUT, that hopefully will be going ahead soon, but I’ll have more on that in the coming months.

I’m really excited to be presenting at the UX Australia conference this year, being held in Sydney. I’ll be presenting on our learnings from our work to date with the FlavourCrusader initiative, including the session we ran at the last Social Innovation Sydney event.

My session is called Eating our 2 and 5: Designing to change food behaviours using mobile devices and will explore how:

• Designing for sustained behaviour change benefits from consideration of additional factors than those found in a purely commercial context
• User experience techniques can be utilised to provide an understanding of “enabling” (and conversely ‘disabling’) factors of behaviour change, as these often present themselves only in context of use
• Novel rapid testing and research techniques can be utilised to simulate such context in a group testing environment
• User interface design choices take on extra gravity when considering behaviour change as an outcome. For example, applied appropriately, game mechanics can be a powerful driver to encourage desired behaviours beyond product use.

On that last point I’ll definitely be interested to attend Paris Buttfield-Addison’s talk Gamification sucks: Lessons from the field, though I suspect from the description we have somewhat similar views on the matter ;)

In fact, I’m humbled to be included in such a diverse and inspiring field of presenters, including contributions from our friends at Digital Eskimo, Rob Manson, and Oliver and Rod from Mobile Experience, among others.

It looks like a fantastic event, which given the feedback I’ve heard from past years’ events is the norm — well worth picking up an early-bird ticket for I’d say…

Your Carbon Footprint that is…

We are proactive in reducing our carbon footprint and being aware of our impact and possibilities to reduce our impact on our environment.  In addition to trying our air travel, through Climate Friendly, and wanted to offset the emissions of our other (essential) emissions-intensive activities.

Climate Friendly works with corporations, businesses and individuals to measure, manage, and offset their carbon footprint, by  providing a quick and easy calculation tool, to take action immediately.  While these tools allow you to calculate offsets for flights, electricity and car travel, we wanted to offset more than those things, so we sent an email to Climate Friendly to see if they could help.  They quickly responded and sent us spreadsheet for us to fill in and  return to them to finish the calculations.

Before we could complete the spreadsheet, we needed obtain certain figures, make calculations and implement procedures to produce more accurate figures — so we thought we’d share how we went about doing it…

The first figure we tackled was our electricity, dividing the KW usage (from our electricity bill) by 5 working days, divided by the staff members.

For paper consumption, we went through our invoices and extracted all paper purchases i.e. A4 80gsm, A4 110gsm, FlipChart per 60gsm etc. worked out an average over the period of time and tracked it in a spreadsheet.

Taxi travel and freight figures were extracted from our cashflow reports from our accounting system.  For paper waste, we didn’t empty our 7 litre recycling bin for 4 weeks and measured how much we filled it for that period.

At the end of the day these figures are not absolute, but by continually measuring our consumption, our hope is that we’ll no longer be grappling for figures, working on guesstimates or making assumptions.  We’ll have a more comprehensive understanding of how big our footprint really is.

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Last week I had the pleasure of attending a workshop organised by the wonderful Dr Zoë Sofoulis and Justine Humphry of University of Western Sydney. Zoë and Justine have been working as part of the National Water Commission Fellowship for 2010-11 on the Cross-connections: Linking Urban Water Managers with Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences Researchers (PDF 311 KB) project.

As the title of the programme suggests, the focus of the workshop was on how to connect social researchers with the water industry. It was a very interesting discussion, looking at the challenge from a variety of perspectives. For me it was an invaluable insight into the challenges of bringing the social sciences into a field that is largely driven by a more quantitative and engineering focused approach.

As part of the days proceedings, Zoë invited me to present a short segment on the use of design research methods for communicating and engaging with ethnographic and qualitative research. My presentation looked at mobile diaries (for which I recommend Penny Hagen and Natalie Rowland’s excellent Johnny Holland article as a backgrounder), personas, infographics and visualisations, customer journey mapping, storyboards. I also used Smart Design’s wonderful work for the FastCompany Biomimicry Challenge (embedded below) as an example of envisioning using video/animation, of particular relevance given the focus on urban water.

IBM Biomimicry Challenge from Smart Design on Vimeo.

Part of what Zoë and Justine have been working on is a Directory of Social and Cultural Research on Urban Water. Their work to date has focused on researching and collating the data for the directory, but they will soon be turning their attention to publishing it. It was during discussion on how this might be advanced that I was reminded again how valuable social technologies like wikis and rapid development frameworks like Ruby on Rails or Django can be in providing low-cost publishing methods for this kind of work.

Thanks to Zoë and Justine for the invite — I’m looking forward to continuing the dialogue into the future.

Like many companies, we have a couple of old computers in the office that are no longer suitable for use by us and are wanting to dispose of them in an environmentally friendly way.

After doing a little bit of research we’ve found a couple of companies online offering such services — they pick up the items and pay you if they still work, can be refurbished and sold, they also destroy any data that’s on them. The services are:

• MRI (Aust) Pty Ltd
• Secure Computer Recycling & Disposal

We were wondering if anyone has had any experience with either company, or could suggest any others that might be worth considering?

We try to be proactive in sustainability and reduce and offset our carbon emissions (for flights, paper usage, transport usage — e.g. cabs etc.).  We are part of a shared office space in a corporate building, and although our hands may be tied in some areas, we feel it’s important to constantly find ways, even small ones, to lessen our carbon footprint.

We’ve just had to estimate our paper usage for offsetting with Climate Friendly which has also got us thinking about ways to reduce the amount of paper we use. We also recently completed the office mini assessment on greenbizcheck website — after hearing about GreenBizCheck at a CORNA meetup) — which also got us thinking (we scored 70% on the mini-assessment, and we’ll be looking into doing a full assessment soon).

With all this in mind I was entering some invoices into our Saasu online accounting file (full disclosure: we share our office with Saasu and some of our staff are shareholders), and I had an electronic invoice for wait for it $1.57. Steeped in traditional ways of “managing the books”, our process is to print the invoice, enter it into Saasu and then file the physical copy in a folder.  Well it was just irking me to have to print off this invoice for such a measly amount.

So Grant, Marc (from Saasu) and I ended up having a discussion about it, going paperless, the pro’s and cons, questions like: does is take more time to find the digital invoice in the system as opposed to just picking up the file that sits on my desk and flicking through the invoices to locate the hard copy?  Is it just a mindset that we have because we are just used to doing it a certain way? (Our experience is that, as much as we harp on about how we like change and want to stay current, humans in general hate change.) Do we need to keep paper copies of receipts etc. for legal reasons?

So we have set ourselves the challenge to do a 3-month trial of going paperless for our accounts, to see how we go.  Now I’m not going to bore you with everyday happenings, but I do hope to report back in a month or so to let you know how it’s all going, and see just how realistic the promise of paperless accounting might be…